Since it's kind of slow nowadays, here's a question for you old pros about something I saw that seemed unusual to me.

This year, during 4th of July weekend, I was on Tawakoni and took some of my family out on the boat for a joy ride. I hadn't planned to fish so I wasn't really prepared, but I threw a couple of rods in, just in case. After seeing a large fish surface, I stopped the boat to cast a while, without any luck.

While casting, I noticed some dark figures swimming under the boat, but they were too deep to ID. I finally got a good look at some near the surface and they were cats. Since I only had a few lures with me and they weren't working, we hung out for a while just to watch the fish. That's when I noticed that they were all swimming by, not hanging out in the area. We'd see 3 or 4 at a time, swimming directly under the boat. As we started looking around, we could see them coming from a distance, just under the surface, with the dorsal spine sticking out of the water like a submarine's periscope. As they approached the boat, they would go deeper and go under the boat, but we never saw them re-surface. We watched this for about 20-30 minutes. Sometimes we'd see as many as 6 or 7 together, but 3 to 5 was more common. Out of curiosity, I even tried throwing lures directly in front of them before they dove down, but still no luck.

They were all nice sized fish, too...no dinks. I would guess all were in the 3-5 pound range. We were out near the state park, pretty much directly in front of the pump station and the state park's swimming beach. The fish were swimming toward the swimming beach, from the direction of the long bridge.

Talking to a few friends, they keep telling me I'm mistaken, that catfish don't do that, so they must not have been cats. I wouldn't have thought so, either, but I saw it myself.

Any idea what was going on? Is this common?

Daniel

I have heard mikec talk about how he thought cats hunted in packs or schools. As for why they were circling, I don't know about that

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  Shawn
  www.[censored]

[This message has been edited by shawn (edited 11-13-2002).]

Could have been blue cats chasing shad. I've caught them in 25 feet of water fishing four feet deep under a float. Used shad, worms and cut bait. Caught some pretty big drum mixed in with the cats.

jacdan, I saw nearly the same thing this summer on Richland-Chambers the middle of June. I was also a bit dumbfounded when I realized what was going on. But, I've talked to several catmen since who say this is very common.

In my case the "Sandies" were surfacing in pursuit of shad and the blues were trailing along behind them by a few hundred feet gobbling up the debris I am confident.

Just like Rollingstone talks about. We were in 60 feet of water and these darn blues were coming within a couple feet of the surface.

But, they were working. You could tell this by their darting every which direction very quickly.

Sounds like the bunch you saw were simply on the prowl with no prospects in sight??

But, blues many times do typically seem to hunt in packs. And, in my experience the pack members will generally be similar in size.

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Mike
www.WhiskerKitty.com

The responces make good sense as to seeing fish exhibit this behavior. I wonder that in this case, since it was hot at the 4th of July and he was there up into the day, that the small packs of cats may have been going back to deeper and cooler water after their night and morning feeding forage into shallow water. Do cats do that like other species do and migrate on a daily basis and if they do could this have been one of those times? Thanks

You didn't hop in and try and snag one or two of them???

I was also on Tawakoni this summer and saw catfish surfacing like schooling bass would do,I was trolling for stripers with sassy shad that day and caught some nice catfish.I had never seen anything like it.